The
“Reverend” Jim Sutter would like you to believe that he is a courageous champion
of tolerance, but he is actually nothing more than a megalomaniac in search of a
résumé.

The drive
for Internet fame has led this otherwise obscure Ohio man to start several blogs in which he purports to do battle with “hate mongers.”In Sutter’s world, this is primarily
defined as anyone who is critical of Islam.
His expressed goal is to censor opposing viewpoints on the “Religion of Peace”
from the Internet (censorship in the name of tolerance… if that makes sense).He embellishes his appeal using the
religious credentials of a “Christian minister” standing up for maligned
Muslims.

Sutter also
finds plenty of time to talk about himself in his many postings, which is
turning out to be a personal liability given his affinity for tall tales.So intent is he on making a name for
himself that there is actually an independent blog
dedicated to exposing the many lies that he has spun about his background and
fictitious accomplishments.

Exposing Sutter
and PhonyRev.com reveal plenty of amusing
details about this sad, little man, including the fact that the religious
credentials and degrees that he has honored himself with are as fraudulent as
his claim to being a
decorated Navy Seal.It seems
that this convicted felon is having a real problem telling the truth about his
criminal background as well.

For about 15
years Sutter has claimed to be a man of the cloth.As to which “cloth” this is exactly,
well, let’s just say that the story evolves with each telling.A 2005 photograph shows him
posing in priest’s garb, trying to bolster his claim as a “Catholic
Minister.”Unfortunately for him, the Catholic
clergy has no such position (and the shirt can be purchased for $29.50 on-line).Sutter has recently declared himself to
be a Baptist pastor - largely it seems, on the strength of a mail order
certificate.He has also claimed to
have three doctorates.

Sutter
currently says that he has “multiple disabilities,” of which he is surprisingly
unforthcoming (given his relentless effort to inspire others into sharing his
fascination with himself).The man
who recently used the tragic death of a critic’s child to enhance a false
accusation of mental illness probably hopes that claiming an unspecified
“disease” will work to his advantage.Even if one takes him at his word, however, he is still in remarkably
good health for a man who passed away from
heart disease eleven years ago (or was it a
brain tumor?).

Given his
efforts to cover his tracks, and the fact that he has an obvious motivation in
fibbing to impress others, Sutter may not fit the clinical definition of a
pathological liar.On the other
hand, this convicted felon has no apparent convictions when it comes to
integrity.If caught in a lie he will either ignore
the situation or try to cover it up with another story.

Sutter’s blog postings are usually little more than superficial
ranting spiced with damning accusations of bigotry and intolerance that are
rarely supported by the rhetoric that he manages to squeeze in between liberal
uses of the word “hate” and the equally ubiquitous soliloquies about himself.With reckless abandon, he seamlessly
lumps critics of Islam together with racists and neo-Nazis, even while admitting
to being “no expert” on the religion itself.

Not
surprisingly, Sutter’s attempts to keep critics of Islam as silent in the West
as they are under Sharia has won him an audience with the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, an Islamic supremacist organization with documented
ties to terrorism.Like the good
“Reverend,” CAIR is self-serving, arrogant and rigidly unapologetic.The group is also not above reaching deep
into the bottom of the barrel to smear a critic, as spokesperson Ibrahim Hooper has done several
times with Robert Spencer of JihadWatch.org.

In fact, it
is their shared hatred of Spencer that brought CAIR and Sutter together, and a
big reason why the latter is enjoying his 15-minutes of fame.

On August 8th,
the CAIR Website briefly
featured
Sutter’s purported 63-page “exposé” on the JihadWatch
founder called “The
Spencer Spin.”This was picked
up by other Muslim sites, causing Mr. Sutter’s main blog
traffic to temporarily spike from less than a dozen hits a day to about a
hundred (interestingly, he doesn’t appear to have figured out that the IP
tracker on his sidebar reports his true readership to be substantially less than
the “thousands” that he often
claims).

That CAIR
would take the pathetically mendacious Jim Sutter seriously speaks to their
desperation.That they would quote
from and post a link to his document on their website speaks to their complete
lack of credibility.The document is
full of lies, errors and sensational but unproven claims about Robert Spencer.It will be very interesting to see if
CAIR continues to stand by Sutter’s work following this analysis.

Introduction

Sutter’s
63-page “exposé” is very much like a freshly fertilized field in that it is best
appreciated from a great distance.I would be willing to bet that few if any of those critics of Spencer who
have been breathlessly linking to Sutter’s rant have bothered to scratch the
surface of it, much less to have read the whole thing.

Needless to
say, Sutter’s product is not what it appears to be.The closer one stands to it, in fact, the
less impressive it becomes.What
seems, at first glance, to be a sophisticated collection of damning evidence
against Spencer turns out to be a drawn-out opinion that is supported by a long
string of links to further opinions that are, for the most part,
unsubstantiated.

Even the
quotes of Robert Spencer that are included in the piece are generally benign and
irrelevant, existing merely for the sake of appearance.Sutter uses sleight-of-hand tactics to
try and convince us that we are seeing confirmation of whatever point he is
attempting to make, but his logic and style are sophomoric and immature.

Much like
the ranting on his website, Sutter uses the gravest of language disingenuously
within the document.Accusations of
“racism” and “ethnic cleansing” appear quite casually, while Sutter feigns
naivety to the necessity of providing justification.His intention is to fool others into
believing that he is presenting something meaningful.

There are
two possible ways to go about building a response to Sutter’s work.The first is to bring a wealth of
information from Muslim sources and from Robert Spencer’s own writing in a
line-by-line refutation.But this
assumes that Sutter’s document merits the dignity of such a response, which it
most certainly does not.The wildly
disorganized and redundant characteristics of Sutter’s work also ensure that a
line-by-line response would be just as tedious and unpleasant of a read as the
original.

Having spent
more time analyzing Sutter’s document than probably even he, I realized that
this is an “exposé” begging for an “exposé” of its own.The document can be adequately
discredited merely from the irrelevancies, self-contradictions, inconsistencies,
errors and lies that are contained within it.
It is not a serious work, nor should it be taken seriously.Those who cite it would do better to read
it, rather than continue embarrassing themselves.

The Facade

The bulk of
Sutter’s effort is in building a façade of academic achievement around what is
mostly insignificant or irrelevant.Endlessly citing one’s own opinion or that of others is entirely
meaningless unless hard evidence is presented in support.

For this
reason, I boiled the document down to its hard points and attempted to focus my
response appropriately.
Unfortunately, this left very little to report on, and I realized that I would
need to provide my own readers with at least a general feel for the tactics and
priorities that comprise the better part of Sutter’s writing.

The Appendix of Doom
Part One - Definitions

The final
fourteen pages of Sutter’s document is composed of a collection of definitions,
statutes, and (of all things) a logic tutorial.Although intended to give his writing a scholarly tone, the information
is immaterial and pompous.

One such
definition, for example, is of something called an “Allport’s
Scale.”Mr. Sutter, in the role of
pseudo-academic, tells us that:

Allport's Scale is a measure of the
manifestation of prejudice in a society. It is also referred to as Allport's Scale of Prejudice and Discrimination or Allport's Scale of Prejudice. It was devised by psychologist
Gordon Allport in The
Nature of Prejudice (1954).

This is
quite captivating, of course, but the problem is that there is no reference to Allport’s Scale anywhere outside of the definitions section.

Neither does
the body of the document lend any reason to define the word “racist” in the
appendix… other than to project an illusion of association between Spencer and
racism.

The Appendix of Doom
Part Two – “Logic”

Interestingly, Mr. Sutter spoils the pretentious list of logic fallacies within
his appendix by attempting to provide examples for each, leading one to wonder
just how well he truly understands the subject matter.

The Straw
Man argument is a case in point.
Sutter correctly defines it as an attack against a distorted version of an
opponent’s premise.The example that
he offers, however, is this:

“Example: Spencer is presented with
an overwhelming number of condemnations of terrorism from current Muslim
leaders, worldwide. In response, he uses a Strawman
argument that Muslim jurists from 1,200 years ago said something else.” (p. 53)

But this is
not an example of a Straw Man argument because “Spencer” is not distorting the
premise in Sutter’s hypothetical example, he is simply ignoring it.

Mr. Sutter
would have done much better to direct readers to page 47 of his own document,
where he provides an excellent demonstration of the Straw Man method in
practice.

Here
(according to the full text in the linked article), one finds Hugh Fitzgerald
stating that the U.S. is capable of seizing Saudi oil fields and then
speculating about the effect that this might have on America’s allies.But Sutter pretends that Fitzgerald is
actually advocating the seizure of oil
fields: “Let’s seize all of our allies’
oil fields – another Spencer/Fitzgerald idea!” (p. 47).

This is an
irrefutable example of a Straw Man argument, because Sutter is deliberately distorting his opponent’s position to
make it appear to be something other than what it is.

Spencer Surrounded by a
Charlatan

Here’s a
quick question.If you have three
enemies around you, are you surrounded?Most people might say yes, but technically the answer is no, according to
the strict definition of “surround,” provided that there is any possible space
between the enemies.

Lest we have
any doubt that Sutter has left no stone unturned, the good “Reverend” questions
Spencer’s credentials as a scholar on the basis of this single statement (p.
48):

"Now that Hamas has complete control
of Gaza, Israel
finds itself surrounded by three Iranian proxies: Syria, Hizballah
and Hamas.”

Sutter takes
great pains to point out that the usage of the word “surround” is technically
incorrect in this case:

“If we look at a map of Israel, we can see that in the real world, Israel borders on
Egypt
(with whom they have a peace treaty), Jordan (with whom they have a peace
treaty), the West Bank (under control of the moderate Abbas
and his Fatah party),
Syria
and Lebanon.
Either Mr. Spencer needs a dictionary to understand the word "surround" (See
Appendix Definitions)” (p. 48)

I have a map
as well, and I have verified that this is true (sans the part about Abbas and Fatah being “moderate”).
But if you squint real hard at my map, the words,
“Who gives a rat’s ass?” appear superimposed somewhere over the
West Bank.

Here’s the
problem, Sutter spends so much of his time taking Spencer to task on minor
issues while leaving far more serious accusations dangling without any proof.
Couldn’t his time have been better spent?

More than
likely, Spencer just used the wrong word in this case, as Sutter himself does on
page 4 when he refers to JihadWatch as a “blogsight”
(sic).

Sutter the Scholar

The
disorganized nature of his document often makes it difficult to tell which words
are Sutter’s and which are borrowed.In my e-mail correspondence with him, Sutter would sometimes plagiarize
entire pages from other sources and insert them into the text of his message
without reference, as if they were his own words, in an apparent attempt to
impress me with his “knowledge.”

There are
cases in which he does the same thing in his “exposé” of Spencer as well, with a
minor example being found on page 30, where he “comes up” with a clever string
of violent verse fragments from the Bible, assuring us that this is what
Jihadis do with the Qur’an (a
mistaken assumption, by the way).
But this list was actually lifted, letter-for-letter, from an
uncredited
source (my guess is Mohamed Elmasry’s
article, which is referred to in an entirely different part of Sutter’s
document).

Turkey: a Terrific Place to Raise Christian
Kids

Sutter
displays an unnatural obsession over a small detail presented in Spencer’s
biography - the claim that his grandparent’s fled Muslim persecution in Turkey
following World War I.In fact,
Sutter devotes 6% of the body of his document trying to prove that there is no
record of the persecution of Melkites in Turkey at that
time.

That Sutter
has been caught red-handed padding his own biography with sensational
fabrications just makes his relentless interest in this minor detail that much
harder to take seriously.
Ironically, one of Sutter’s favorite words these days is “ad-hominem.”He accuses others of making arguments
against the person rather than the message… which helps put his own attack
against Spencer in perspective.

Still, this
doesn’t necessarily prove him wrong.

But although
Sutter’s presentation of this point is verbose, the underlying research is
hardly exhaustive.It is also a bit
of a stretch to believe that there was no persecution against Christians in
Turkey
during the four years between
massacres
of over a million of them by the Young Turks.
Even today, as the recent
brutal murder of three Christian activists there demonstrates, it is still
extremely difficult to be a religious minority in what is often billed as the
most “progressive” of Muslim countries.

Much like
Sutter’s own claim that he has the ability to “read, speak and write Arabic,”
there is no way to disprove what Robert Spencer may or may not have heard from
his grandparents, which makes this an insignificant point.

Perhaps
Spencer has a better answer to the issue raised.My personal feeling is that he probably
knows his own grandparents better than does Sutter.

The Lesser Sutter

Sutter’s
hubris is least suitable during the times that he tries to prove himself the
superior to Spencer in the area of Islamic theology. This includes episodes such as the following,
in which Sutter tells us:

“The other major faulty premise on
which Spencer bases many of his arguments is the call for jihad, by these 7th
Century scholars. In Islam, there are two basic types of jihad, the lesser jihad
- which is (defensive only) fighting off an invader of a Muslim country, and the
greater jihad, which is the struggle within yourself to be humble, to not be
greedy, to live a good, charitable, and gentle life. The greater jihad is taken
originally from a hadith which quotes Muhammad talking about how it is more
important than the lesser jihad.” (p 42)

Spencer cuts
short Sutter’s fantasy by noting:

“THE "GREATER JIHAD" HADITH IS WEAK.
IT DOESN'T APPEAR IN ANY OF THE SIX MOST ACCEPTED HADITH COLLECTIONS”

Not to be
outdone, Sutter responds:

“However, while Spencer is correct in
pointing out that this Hadiths authenticity is
somewhat controversial, he completely fails to mention
that while considered "weak, it is not ignored.”

Now, for
those of you following along at home, this is a bit like taking your astronomy
professor to task for giving a sound lecture, but “failing to mention” that the
moon isn’t made out of green cheese.

A weak
hadith is one that is rejected by the consensus of Islamic scholars, usually on
the basis of a disreputable chain of narration or an inconsistency with
something that is known to be reliable.However, by definition a weak hadith is one that someone wanted to
believe was legitimate at some point in history, so Spencer is not saying that
it was ever ignored altogether.

Sutter goes
on to mention that a 13th century Sufi (mystic) scholar took the
hadith seriously, but this is immaterial to the fact that few other true
scholars do.(Here
is the reason why, from a Muslim source).

Sutter the Arabic
Warrior

This section
wouldn’t be complete without a tip of the hat to Sutter’s remarkable ability to
insert wild claims about himself throughout his writing. Even an article ostensibly dedicated to Robert
Spencer is an excuse for Sutter to brag about his suspect background and
accomplishments.

One
particularly questionable talent that Sutter credits himself with is the ability
to “speak, read and write Arabic” (p.
14)This was a personal surprise to
me, since he forgot to mention it when we were arguing over the meaning of
particular Arabic words only a few weeks earlier (perhaps he was just being
modest).

I don’t
suppose there’s any real way to prove that someone doesn’t know Arabic, but, considering the source, this should
certainly be categorized as ‘extremely unlikely’.

On the same
page, Sutter also claims to have “fought
side-by-side with Muslim members of the U.S. military,” which brings to mind
an image of Seaman Jim standing on deck, grittily hammering away on his
50-caliber at Viet Cong scaling up the sides while Ahmed feeds him the ammo
belts.One suspects, however, that
this is more of a circuitous association that probably requires
a
overburdened flowchart and a very loose definition of the word “fight.”

The Hypocrisy

If the world
loved a hypocrite, then Sutter would be as popular with the rest of us as he is
with himself.His writing reeks of
double standards and implied contradictions, all of which seem to have eluded
his mighty mental prowess.

Double Standards, Part
One – In it for the Money

Sutter
claims several times (p. 1, 6, 45, 48-50) that Robert Spencer has a “vested,
financial interest” in criticizing Islam, but he bases this on the mere fact
that Spencer makes money from his activities.There is no evidence offered to support either the implication that
Spencer is making significantly more than he would be in other circumstances
(particularly when factoring in a time-cost ratio), nor the allegation that
financial gain is a primary motivation.

Still, there
is no other reason to bring this up other than to imply that Spencer should be
disregarded, since he makes an income from pushing a particular view of Islam.

The problem
here is that Sutter himself relies heavily on the favorable opinions of clerics
and employees of Muslim organizations throughout his document, even though these
individuals can also be said to have a financial interest in promoting a
particular view of Islam, at least according to the same standards that are
applied to Spencer.This is also
true of
DineshD’Souza and Karen
Armstrong, both relied on by Sutter, but both of whom make money from their
activities defending mainstream Islam.

Sutter makes
no attempt to explain this glaring inconsistency.

Double Standards, Part
Two – It’s Only Wrong When You Tell the Truth

Another
example of double standards occurs when Sutter praises the Pakistani prime
minister for blaming the linkage between Islam and terrorism on “Islamophobia” (p. 40).At the same time, he castigates Spencer for attributing the same linkage
to the terrorists themselves (who kill explicitly in the name of Islam) and
calls it a “blame someone else”
argument in the same league as Joseph Goebbels.

Again, this
is presented without explanation.
Why is it praiseworthy for a Muslim leader to scapegoat critics of Islam for
Islamic terror, while these same critics are likened to Nazis for pointing out
that terrorists are the ones making the association between violence and Islam
when they openly credit their religion?

When the Messenger
Forgets the Message

A 63-page
document that pulls together nearly every negative thing ever said about a
person who has written and spoken publicly in the prolific fashion that Robert
Spencer has is bound to hit on a few good points.In this digital age of political
correctness, it is simply impossible to comment, day in and day out, on a
controversial subject without giving the critics something to run with at some
point along the way.

I did not
analyze every critique linked to by Sutter, since he usually provided the
excerpts that he felt were relevant.
My interest was in trying to extract fact from accusation and then establish its
significance.I don’t care about the
opinion that someone has about Spencer, nor how gracefully they express it.
I only care about whether it is pertinent and grounded in fact.

A section
entitled “Spencer’s Critic’s State:” starts on page 17 and appears to run until
page 21.It is a compilation of
links to nearly every negative article that exists on the Internet about Robert
Spencer.For the most part, the
blurbs that Sutter quotes are noteworthy for their damning eloquence and lack of
substance.In some cases the critics
express their own opinion, sometimes they assure us of the opinion of others.

Behind the
blurbs are links to articles, some of which are as superficial as their title
while others make good-sounding (if somewhat obscure) points which then become
the foundation for exaggeration.
Since my interest is in Sutter’s document, I mainly focused on what he quoted
directly within it.

In my
opinion, the closest that anyone comes to making a good point is this excerpt
from Karen Armstrong:

“…Spencer is not interested in
balance. He picks out only those aspects of Islamic tradition that support his
thesis. For example, he cites only passages from the Koran that are hostile to
Jews and Christians and does not mention the numerous verses that insist on the
continuity of Islam with the People of the Book: ‘Say to them: We believe what
you believe; your God and our God is one.’"

This is not
entirely true.To use just one
example, in his book Islam Unveiled
Spencer does speak of Muhammad’s charter with the monks of St. Catherine’s
Monastery and even quotes verse 2:256 from the Qur’an (“no compulsion in
religion”).But he also memorializes the victims of
Jihad and Dhimmitude by letting his readers in on the
other side of the story.Like most
authors, Spencer does pursue an agenda in his writing, which is to counter the
popular misconceptions about Muhammad and Islam.

The real
problem with Sutter picking Karen Armstrong to deliver what seems to be a
reasonable sounding message is that Armstrong has much larger problems of her
own in this area.Her “biography” of
Muhammad, Muhammad: A
Prophet for Our Time, is a highly romanticized whitewash that either glosses
over, or omits altogether, the less-than-flattering parts of his life.
Just like a Muslim apologist, Armstrong disregards reliable hadith and accounts
from respected biographers that appear to conflict with her interpretation of
the Qur’an.

Even in the
very process of reprimanding Spencer for writing with a bias, Armstrong is
incapable of setting aside her own.
The verse that she quotes (in Sutter’s excerpt) is found in the 29th
Sura, which was written at a time when Muslims were migrating from Mecca to
Medina and needed the protection of more powerful Jewish tribes there.It is also at this time that Muhammad had
his followers temporarily pray toward Jerusalem,
rather than Mecca,
to try and win over the Jews.

Things
changed once Muhammad had the power to enforce his will on the other tribes.
In fact, one of the last things he ever did was order the eviction of Christians
and Jews from the entire Arabian Peninsula.

Armstrong
could also just as easily have quoted from Sura 109, which states, “I worship not that which ye worship, nor
will ye worship that which I worship,” or at least included in her article…
you know, for the sake of balance.

Of course,
if Armstrong is truly as concerned about balance as she insists, and has any
confidence in her research, then one has to wonder why she refuses to accept
Spencer’s invitation to debate.One
suspects that her grand and flowery opinions of Muhammad and his taste for
liberal 21st century values would contrast poorly to the hard data
that Spencer unearths from Muslim sources.

Ethnic Cleansing for
Dummies

The casual
manner in which Sutter accuses Spencer of supporting ethnic cleansing without
providing any real justification for his claim is downright creepy.Wouldn’t such a serious topic at least be
worth an entire section in his document?

In the
popular consciousness, ethnic cleansing is nearly synonymous with genocide.
The phrase is used in reference to the forced removal or murder of a people
based on their race or ethnicity.It
brings to mind images of the Holocaust and the numerous Muslim massacres of
Hindus on the Indian subcontinent.

Sutter
disingenuously preys on this public connotation in order to smear Spencer.The actual connection that he makes
between Spencer and true ethnic cleansing is more of a “Sixteen Degrees of Kevin
Bacon” sort of game, with about twelve steps missing.

Although the
accusation is made several times, there are only two places in Sutter’s document
where any attempt to justify associating Robert Spencer with ethnic cleansing is
found.

The first is
so obscure that it appears even Sutter himself missed it.On page 46, a mysterious editor relays a
note letting Sutter know that putting a stop to Muslim immigration and deporting
all Muslim non-citizens is “ethnic cleansing.”

The second
reference is contained in an entirely different part of the document.On page 17, Sutter provides a link to a
Web posting that quotes Hugh Fitzgerald of JihadWatch
using the example of the Czech deportation of Sudeten Germans following World
War II at the end of a long list of
alternatives to dropping a nuclear bomb on Mecca in the aftermath of a
nuclear attack on the U.S. (something that an objective reader might think to be
more generous then genocidal).

Both of
these references are by Hugh Fitzgerald and not Robert Spencer.Incredibly, Sutter justifies attributing
these words to Spencer by theorizing that they are the same person (p. 46)!

The biggest
problem with defining a halt to Muslim immigration and the deportation of
non-citizens as “ethnic cleansing” is that it sure doesn’t sound like it.Even if Islam is dubiously defined as an
‘ethnicity’ unto itself, ethnic cleansing would have to be the forced removal of
all Muslims, not just the tiny minority who aren’t citizens.

Secondly,
let’s just say that if telling Muslims that they have to live in their own
Muslim countries is akin to forcing them into concentration camps, then this
sounds more like an excellent argument for resisting the spread of the very
religion that makes these nations so unlivable in the first place.

Of course,
there is absolutely nothing that obligates the U.S. to accept immigrants.If this is “ethnic cleansing,” then it is
the sort that true victims of ethnic cleansing in places like China and the Sudan would love to trade places
with.

But, in
fact, Sutter is simply smearing Spencer with big words, while pretending to be
oblivious to the implied gravity of them.

As a rule,
in fact, it is the Muslim world that does not accept non-Muslim immigrants.
In our time, we have seen the forced eviction of a million Jews from these
nations along with the horrible abuse of religious minorities.Either of these would far better qualify as ethnic cleansing than simply
telling non-citizens that they cannot stay.

Sutter’s
heightened sensitivities are, of course, nowhere to be found when it comes to
Muslim bigotry…

Acceptable Bigotry

Imagine a
supremacist political ideology in which:

1)The highest form of distinction is
made between those who follow it and those who don’t.

2)Rights and privileges are assigned to
its members that are not extended to non-members.

3)Discrimination against non-members is
hard-coded into the creed, and members are told to actively pursue the
subjugation of non-members.

4)Members revere propaganda that
arrogantly refers to non-members in the most hateful terms, calling them
“perverse,” “vile,” and “cursed by God.”

5)Members revere propaganda that
advocates violence to those outside the faith, using the graphic language of
beheading, amputation and torture.Slavery, wife-beating and polygamy are all permitted practices.

6)Radical members of the group are
responsible for more than ten thousand violent deaths each and every year
explicitly in the name of their ideology, despite the billions of dollars and
thousands of lives that are spent trying to prevent the killing.

Now, imagine
a person, who fancies himself a knight in armor against hate and bigotry… but who
actually spends his time attacking people who try to check the spread of
this hateful, bigoted, supremacist ideology by educating others as to the threat
that it poses.

Viola!You have Jim Sutter carrying water for
the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the open bigotry of Islam.

Here is a
man who sweats the mosquito with the Robert Spencers
of the world, making the dubious association with ethnic cleansing using a
tenuous array of obscure definitions and tortuous logic, while at the same time,
maintaining the highest credulity for a religion that has an on-going history of
putting the Qur’anic command to kill non-submissive unbelievers into practice.

This is
simply not a person who takes himself seriously, so why should anyone else?

The Errors

The healthy
opinion that Jim Sutter has of himself is rivaled only by the pretentiousness
with which he expresses it:

“At first I thought Spencer was
either misinformed or just ignorant on the subject of Islam, as is common of
those who "self-teach" themselves on complicated topics, especially those
involving theology, the evolution of culture, and how these affect the reality
of contemporary society

I patiently read the voluminous email
sent by Spencer (A for Effort, F for Accuracy) approaching them with an open
mind, carefully researched each topic he raised and responded to as many as I
could.When I realized how mistaken
most of them were, I successfully refuted them using a vast number of
authoritative sources…” (p. 2),

Sutter’s
sense of self-importance becomes even more amusing when considered within the
context of a document that is riddled with bad logic, mathematical errors,
intellectual shallowness, faulty reasoning and downright falsehoods.Distinguishing these from each other
proved to be such a challenge that I eventually decided merely to try and
categorize them into two groups: errors and lies.

Admittedly,
this is an imperfect science.Determining whether Sutter is being deceitful or just ignorant is harder
than merely telling whether or not something that he says is false, particularly
since he is so good at lying.

Qutb, Islam’s Methuselah?

On page 17,
Spencer is accused of not quoting scholars who “lived past 1406,” yet, on page 30, he is criticized for “frequently citing”
SayyidQutb, an Islamist scholar who died in 1966.

All Means All (except when it doesn’t)

One of
Sutter’s “proofs” that Spencer “trashes all Muslims” (emphasis mine) is a
blurb of a JihadWatch article (p. 10) in which Spencer
praises the “valiant Muslim women” who are working to rid their societies of
honor killings.

Sutter does not undermine himself quite as overtly when referencing
other Spencer writings, but the links provided to the original text do
occasionally refute the point that he is trying to make.

Sutter the Scholar,
Part Deux

The
ironically-titled section, “Spencer has been Criticized for His Poor
Understanding of Muslim History,” (ironic, because the “Reverend” Sutter
exhibits such a poor understanding of his
own
history) contains just one item.In
response to his challenge, Dinesh
D’Souza
takes Spencer to task for being able to name only one Shia-Sunni conflict in the
past 350 years (aside from Iraq) (p. 22).

Sutter
evidently thinks that this is a criticism of Spencer’s inability to name
Shia-Sunni conflicts that did occur during that time frame, but this is not at
all the point that D’Souza is making.In fact, rather than disparaging
Spencer’s knowledge of Muslim history, D’Souza is
agreeing with it and drawing conclusions from it.

How Sutter
manages to fill an entire section with something that completely undermines its
advertised thesis is beyond understanding.

Oops… Sutter Trashes
Islam

Sutter
accuses Spencer of arguing that the Qur’an is immutable but then claiming that
violent verses abrogate peaceful ones.While this certainly constitutes a logical contradiction, it is one that
is firmly rooted in the Qur’an itself (see
Sura 2:106) and Spencer can hardly be blamed for bringing it to light.

There are
verses of peace and tolerance in the Qur’an.There are also verses of hate, violence and intolerance.Unfortunately there are more of the
latter than of the former.

There is
also a chronological progression in the Qur’an from peace to violence that is inversely related to the oppression that
Muslims were under at the time.In
other words, tolerance was the rule of the day when Muslims were under true
persecution at Mecca, but commands to slay unbelievers only appeared later under
far less justifiable circumstances.

Which verses
take priority over others?The rule
of thumb in Islam has always been that later verses abrogate earlier ones in
cases of contradiction (Sura
16:101).This is because it makes no sense for
Allah to refer to an earlier verse as a “better” replacement for a later one.Why issue the later one at all if it is
immediately inferior to its earlier substitute?

As an
example of why abrogation is a necessary part of Islam, consider that in
Sura 2:221
and
60:10
Allah commands Muslims not to marry idolaters and unbelievers.In
5:72 and
9:28-31, the Christians are presented as being both.Yet, in
5:5, permission is given to marry Christians (in a command that happens to
coincide quite curiously with Muhammad’s personal desire to take a Christian
girl as a wife).Muslims usually
resolve the contradiction by noting that Sura 5 was a later “revelation.”

The simple
fact that condemning Spencer on the issue of abrogation actually means
condemning an accepted Islamic tradition appears to be lost on Sutter, who
launches into a spasm of self-congratulation by running down a pretentious list
of eleven logical fallacies that have supposedly been violated (p. 34).

No
Sharia
Here, Mate

To disparage
any public discussion of dhimmitude, Sutter claims
that “the only country under Islamic (Sharia)
Law is Iran” and that therefore “dhimmitude is not required practice anywhere except
Iran” (p. 15)Sutter’s mistaken
assumption is that an entire country must be under Sharia
law in order for it to be practiced anywhere within its borders.

In fact, Sharia courts exist in many places, including Saudi Arabia (where Jews are not even allowed to
set foot), the Sudan (where
genocide in the name of Jihad has claimed 2 million lives), Somalia, Pakistan and elsewhere.The most notorious
Sharia
courts may be in Nigeria,
which, in 2001, publicly
flogged a 17-year-old girl after she became pregnant from rape.With the bloody Hamas coup, Gaza will almost certainly be seeing Sharia courts as well.

Given that
there is also pressure to bring about Sharia in the
West (which always rises with the proportion of Muslims within a population) in
places like
Canada
and
Britain,
dhimmitude and Islamic law would appear to be entirely
appropriate topics for discussion.(I’d like to begin the conversation by asking whether Sutter is out of
his ever-loving mind by saying that “the ‘dhimmitude’
[in Iran] must not be too terrible.”(See
Exhibit ‘A’))

Karen Armstrong:
English Nun or American Bad-Ass?

On page 18,
the erudite Jim Sutter informs us that Karen Armstrong is “America’s Foremost Expert on Islam.”Evidently, he does not know the first
thing about this former English nun, since she is not American and doesn’t live
in America.

Breaking News: Sutter
and Mrs. Sutter the Same Person!

I can’t
actually say that Sutter accuses Robert Spencer and Hugh Fitzgerald of being the
same person, because he merely raises the suggestion that they are (p. 46).Unfortunately, this becomes a premise in
larger arguments, in which conclusions are drawn about Spencer based on the
writings of Fitzgerald.

Sutter’s
journalistic bombshell that Fitzgerald and Spencer are
the same person is actually based on nothing more than the apparent fact that
they share both a mailing address and similar opinions.

Let’s hope
that there are at least some married couples out there who are unimpressed by
this line of reasoning.

“The 4,200”

Sutter
claims to provide a list of “4,200 Muslim scholars” on record as rejecting
terrorism.Later, he refers to the
list as 4,200 “Muslim leaders.”
Later still, he throws in “writers” and “journalists.”Regardless of who these people actually are, however, Sutter assures us
that they “all of whom without reservation clearly condemn… terrorism, violence,
suicide bombings and militant Jihad” (p. 34).

Except that
they don’t.

In the first
place, many if not most of the individuals listed are responding to a specific
event, such as September 11th or the 7/7 bombings.Those who do appear to issue blanket
denunciations of terrorism against innocent persons, for the most part, do not
define what these terms mean.

This is
significant because the list includes several individuals who also happen to be
advocates of terrorism, such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who (in stark
contradiction to Sutter’s introduction) actively supports the suicide bombings
that have killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, Omar Bakri
Muhammad, who praises the 9/11 terrorists as “magnificent” and has encouraged
Muslims to “cut the throats” of British soldiers, and Muhammad Khatami, the former president of Iran, one of the world’s
leading exporters of Islamic terror.

In fact,
some of the links that Sutter provides actually contain open support for terrorism.One such
group
of scholars, for example, describes “acts
by the Palestinians against the Israeli occupation as a form of jihad and
legitimate self-defense.”Of
course, these “legitimate acts” have included the deliberate bombing of Israeli
shopping malls, cafes, hotels, discos and buses that have killed hundreds of
men, women and children and left thousands more with debilitating mental and
physical injury.

Another
so-called “condemnation” of terror that is liberally quoted by Sutter actually
authorizes the Taliban to “defend” their illegitimate government against “U.S. aggression.”Aside from openly calling for the killing
of Western troops, the writer is defending one of the world’s most brutal and
totalitarian Islamist regimes.The
same source also denounces suicide, but then praises ‘martyrdom’ in the same
breath, appearing to assume that every zealot who straps on an explosives vest
is somehow aware of the difference.

It turns out
that the line between Jihad and terrorism is really quite ambiguous, despite the
confidence that every Muslim seems to have in his or her own opinion.
CAIR, for example, has a
dubious “fatwa against terrorism” posted on their site, but it adamantly
refuses to condemn Palestinian terrorist organizations as such.Neither has it ever denounced the murder of Americans in uniform at the
hands of the Taliban or al-Qaeda overseas (to my knowledge).Amazingly, in the last six years, the
organization has only seen fit to acknowledge and condemn less than 30 of the more than
9,000 Islamic terror attacks that have taken place during that time.

This is why
real definitions are so important. It
isn’t enough for Muslim leaders to use general terms like “terrorism” and
“innocent life” without explaining what they really mean.And when they don’t, it’s usually for
good reason.

Although
Sutter repeatedly accuses Spencer of ignoring Muslim voices against terrorism –
to the extent that it is a premise in nearly every one of the “logical
fallacies” listed in the appendix of his document – the real source of
contention is that Spencer is actually
paying far more attention to these voices than Sutter.

In fact, it
does not appear that Sutter has devoted himself to even the slightest analysis
of the list on which he so confidently relies.This is based partly on the fact that the “condemnations against terror”
actually contains sanctions of terrorism and the names of terror advocates, and
partly on the fact that it does not contain the 4,200 unique names
that he is advertising.

Without
citing his sources, it seems that the good “Reverend” blindly copied the pieces
of his list from multiple providers and made little apparent effort to cull
redundancy, fix broken links or even tally the names.While this makes it nearly impossible to
verify the actual count, a spot check indicates that the number of unique
individuals listed is much closer to a few hundred than to 4,200.How many of these are true leaders versus
ordinary Muslims quoted by journalists is also difficult to determine.

To be sure,
there are sincere leaders within the Muslim community who do reject terrorism in
the unmitigated sense that the rest of us do.Unfortunately, there are many more that
do not, and pretending otherwise won’t make it any different.

The Lies

So
disingenuous is Jim Sutter that it is difficult to tell when he really is lying.
He has a habit of saying things that are not true with such confidence, that it
often appears as if he really believes himself.
He is also deliberately unwilling to see and hear beyond what he wants to, even
in the face of persuasive contrary evidence.

It is
terribly ironic that Sutter accuses Spencer of nearly everything that he is so
deliberately guilty of himself, including deception and falsehood.I begin this section with some of these
accusations against Spencer then gradually move into Sutter’s own little world
of make-believe.

Where’s the Beef? -
Part One

In his many
rants, Jim Sutter often accuses Robert Spencer of telling “glaring” and
“deliberate” lies.One would
therefore expect to find at least an entire section of his “exposé” dedicated to
presenting these alleged lies in blistering sequence…

No such
luck.

Amazingly,
in 63 pages Sutter only provides two instances of what he calls a “deliberate
lie.”

The first is
on page 13, when Spencer is quoted as
saying“Note once again that we have never seen this
kind of rage against Osama bin Laden or any of the others whom we are endlessly
told have "hijacked" Islam.”

Spencer is
referring to the Muslim outrage over Salman Rushdie’s
knighthood by Queen Elizabeth.He
also quotes an article in which several Muslim groups offer rewards for killing
Rushdie as other Muslims worldwide burn flags and effigies of the British
author.A Pakistani Religious
Affairs Minister is even quoted as saying that a suicide bombing against Rushdie
might be necessary to “protect the honor of the Prophet.”

According to
Sutter, it is a “deliberate lie” to
suggest that “we have never seen this kind
of rage against Osama bin Laden,” because there are Muslims leaders who have
condemned terror and (following 9/11) there were a handful of rallies against
terror in parts of the Muslim world.

But Sutter
knows that Spencer never said that there aren’t Muslims who say they condemn
terror.Spencer’s point was that the
horror perpetrated by Islamic terrorists does not inspire the sort of outrage
that the Muslim world exhibits over other, less significant, events, such as the
knighting of Salman Rushdie or the drawing of a
Muhammad cartoon.

Spencer is
absolutely correct on this point and Sutter is dead wrong.There were no embassies attacked or flags
burned, even following 9/11.No one
suggested suicide bombings against al-Qaeda to “defend the honor of the
prophet.”There are no Muslim groups
offering bounties for Osama’s assassination.I am not even aware of a single burning of Osama’s effigy by an outraged
Muslim mob - certainly nothing that would compare to the many times that
Rushdie’s image has been put to the flame, at least.

Why does
killing in the name of Allah not produce the sort of general outrage among
Muslims that other “insults” to the faith do?Probably because it was something that Muhammad himself did and
encouraged others to do, even if today’s believers tepidly disagree with one
another over the conditions that authorize beheadings and bombings.

Where’s the Beef? -
Part Two

The second
lie that Sutter attributes to Spencer is on page 42:

“What Islamist extremists and Spencer
have most in common is that they both lie when they cite 7th Century jurists as
if they were relevant to and binding on the contemporary world - all Muslims
everywhere, in today's society.”

Sutter
overextends himself quite a bit on this, reflecting a poor understanding of
Islamic fundamentals as well as Spencer’s personal challenge to Muslims.

Sutter as a
“Christian” (and I use the term loosely) is probably confusing his 7th century with Islam’s.
While the teachings of the Christian church were well established by the 600’s,
Islam was in a stage similar to the decades following the time of Jesus.

How
ridiculous would it sound for someone to say that the writings and opinions of
first century Christians are irrelevant and arbitrary to Christians today?This would of course exclude the Gospels
and the letters of the apostle Paul, without which there is no body of Christian
theology.

Muhammad
died in 632 (which is the 7th century, for any Sutterites reading this).
It was in the decades following that the traditions (Hadith) and the Qur’an were
compiled.The fundamental policies of the religion
were formed during that time by the very people who either personally knew their
prophet or personally knew those who did.
The Shia sect was formed in these years (in blood) and the four major Sunni
schools were all founded within the first two centuries.

Today’s
devout Muslims are very serious about the opinions and writings of those who
lived during that time.It is quite
generous of Sutter to declare that their interest is unnecessary and to let
Muslims know just how capricious their religion is really supposed to be, but
I’m not too sure that very many would care to have him speak for them.

If the
sophomoric Sutter were to actually browse through his list of Muslim
“condemnations” of terror (rather than simply post headlines), he would not find a single denouncement of any of these 7th century jurists
that he thinks Spencer brings up unfairly, and there are excellent reasons for
this.

Spencer, on
the other hand, has a much deeper understanding of the tension between
contemporary Western values and the dark history and teachings of Islam.His challenge is for peaceful Muslims to
reform their faith by openly rejecting (rather than passively disregarding) the
elements that are fundamentally incompatible with true tolerance and civil
liberty.

Sutter
believes that Islam is just another religion because that is what Muslims tell
him.He has no business attacking
someone who takes the time to dig beneath the surface.

Pulling Numbers Out of
His…

Sutter
claims that Spencer “denies that any other
form of terrorism exists in today’s world other than Islamist” (p. 36).
This is flatly false.Nowhere does Spencer say this and nowhere
does Sutter attempt to prove it.In
fact, the assertion seems to be internally contradicted by an e-mail that Sutter
himself includes in which Spencer says that the threat from non-Islamic terror
is minimal (p. 38).Minimal
does not mean non-existent.

To try and
prove that America’s greatest threat of terrorism in “today’s world” comes from domestic terror organizations (presumably
non-Islamic), Sutter flashes a list of 70 domestic terror groups that he says
are responsible for “3,328 fatalities”
that do “not include casualties from the
9/11 attacks.”

The majority
of organizations on the list are defunct and Sutter does not say how he arrived
at his figure of 3,328 deaths.Does it include all murders from domestic terrorists since 1812 or since
1998?

Since the
list includes the Ku Klux Klan, the only truly prolific American terrorist
group, my first assumption was that Sutter included the number of recorded lynchings since 1882 to arrive at his total.But the number of
lynchings
alone is actually higher than Sutter’s overall number, even if one excludes
non-African-Americans.

Intensely
curious, I searched on the Internet for some justification of Sutter’s
statistic.The only source that I
could find was Sutter himself!In a
June 19, 2007
posting
on a third-party website, Sutter clarifies his numbers:

Suddenly it
becomes evident that Sutter’s real source is what he happens to be sitting on
most of the time.Even the
allegation that the groups on his list are “Christian” is quite a stretch.There are a couple of Christian extremist
organizations, such as the Army of God, but the majority of the list is composed
of groups like Weather Underground and the Black Panthers, who have never
defined Christian goals in their agenda.(I’m pretty sure that the Islamic Salvation Front wouldn’t qualify,
either).

As for the
Klan, they have been responsible for fewer murders in the last 50 years combined
than Islamic terrorists rack up every
single day.Their last recorded
killing appears to have taken place over twenty-five years ago.By contrast, Muslim extremists have
killed 32 people in 24 terror attacks on
U.S.
soil just since 9/11.

Worse than Bad Math

In the
section entitled, “Deceit on Spencer’s Part” (p. 43) Sutter takes Spencer to
task for saying that “300,000 American Muslims support suicide attacks” when the
actual number (according to Sutter) is really 3,600 “based on only 3 Nation of Islam members.”Interestingly, both of these wildly
different estimates are based on the same
Pew Research Poll.

1)According to the poll, 13% of all
U.S. Muslims believe that suicide bombings can be justified.

2)13% of the 2.35 million total Muslims
in Americais about 300,000.

And here’s
how Sutter arrived at his number (p. 43-44):

1)317 of the respondents are between
the ages of 18 and 29.This age
group represents 30% of the total number of Muslims.

2)1% of these (representing “3 young
Nation of Islam members”) say suicide bombings are justified in “fighting off an
invader.”

3)1% of 30% of 1.2 million (adults) is
3,600

As one might
suspect, there are enormous problems with Sutter’s methodology:

First,
Sutter disregards the Muslims who say that suicide bombings can be justified in
some circumstances.The actual
figure is 13%.Oops… suddenly
Sutter’s 3,600 becomes 46,800.

Secondly,
Pew places the number of adult Muslims at 1.4 million, not 1.2.This bumps Sutter’s number up a bit to
54,600.

Third,
Sutter completely disregards the other adult age groups, automatically
dismissing 70% of the sample.This
is a problem because the figure of 1% that he uses comes explicitly from the entire
sample (Pew p. 59).Ay Caramba, now we’re talking 182,000.

Let’s pause
for a second and consider that 182,000 is a lot closer to 300,000 than it is to
3,600.Spencer is off by a factor of
1.6, Sutter by about 50!In
Spencer’s case, he neglected to exclude the non-adult portion of the population
in reaching his overall estimate (a point that Sutter failed to pick up on,
interestingly).Sutter, who accuses
Spencer of having “poor math skills,” apparently just misread the report
altogether.

Actually
this may be putting it too kindly.
In fact, Sutter goes well out of his way to
fabricate
several details that don’t exist in the Pew report, leading one to believe that
his mathematical lapses were probably by design.

In the first
place, Sutter says that the sample of young adults is “primarily consisting of Nation of Islam members.”Not true.Nowhere does the document say this.In fact, only 26% of Muslims in the U.S. even describe themselves as
African-American (Pew p. 17), much less as belonging to the Nation of Islam,
which is an even smaller minority.

Sutter lies
again when he says that those in the sample who support suicide bombings agreed
that they were “justified in fighting off
an invader.”Elsewhere he uses
the phrase “repel invaders.”

But, in
fact, the Pew Research poll never mentions invaders or foreign armies.This is an invention of Sutter’s.The issue of suicide bombings in the poll
is only within the context of “defending Islam” and the targets of the suicide
bombings are explicitly defined as civilian.

Now, how
ironic is it that Sutter accuses Spencer of using “deceit, creative interpretation and outright lies” when
interpreting the results of this research poll to a broader audience!

Spencer Guilty of
Assuming Sutter to Be Reasonable

Sutter
repeatedly accuses Spencer of “trashing”
and “condemning” “all Muslims and all of Islam.”I have classified this (ample) part of
his document as a lie because it is patently false, as even the very material
that he includes makes clear.

Sutter is
not a stupid man, but to make his points, he often pretends to be incapable of
profound thought.He assumes that
the reader is as intellectually lazy as he is, perfectly content to exist in a
black-and-white world without digging beneath the surface to discover and
grapple with the competing complexities and inconvenient particulars that are a
part of reality.

Islam,
according to Sutter, is just like other religion.For him, it is Christianity with an
alternative vocabulary.Why?Well because Muslims assure him that it
is and this conforms to what he wants to believe.In Sutter’s simple world, there is no room for ambivalence or for
considering that the fundamental teachings of Islam may be wildly at odds with
modern values.

This becomes
the foundation for one of the longest sections of Sutter’s document, which
(although not clearly defined) appears to begin on page 7 and end on page 13.
In between, there is an ambiguous meandering that incorporates nineteen links
falling mostly into two categories: either something that Robert Spencer has
said about a specific part of Islam, or something that someone is saying about
Robert Spencer.

An example
of the former is a
JihadWatch article in which Spencer takes issue with the
statement that “there is nothing in the Qur’an that violates human rights.”
Spencer responds by quoting Qur’anic verses in which men are allowed to keep
women as sex slaves and to torture to death unfortunates who “make corruption in
the land.”

Examples of
someone else’s opinion about Spencer can be found in most of the cited articles
by Bob Pitt of “Islamophobia Watch,” which generally criticize Spencer for
opposing the spread of Islamic influence in the West or for saying that
terrorism is “deeply rooted in Islam.”

However,
neither the criticism of certain elements of Islam nor the claim that Islamic
terrorism is “rooted” in Islam is a condemnation of all of Islam, nor all
Muslims.In fact, several of the
JihadWatch
articles quoted by Mr. Sutter either
defend the cause of Muslims who are suffering under the extreme elements of
their religion or praise those Muslims
who are
fighting
for rights.Still others
clarify his position as not being
anti-Muslim in the sense that Sutter means for us to believe.

Out of the
nineteen links provided, only one
appears to be relevant.It is to a
May 30, 2005
posting on JihadWatch in which Spencer starts by saying, “"I have written on numerous occasions that
there is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful
Muslims and jihadists."

Taken by
itself, this is a ridiculous remark.
In my personal life, I have known quite a few Muslims who are not even remotely
comparable to terrorists.I’m sure
that my experience isn’t much different from other Americans.Can Spencer really be that dense?

But, of
course, there is more to this snippet than meets the eye. If we isolate the statement, we can see that it
is self-contradictory.How can
Spencer say that there is no distinction while at the same time necessarily
implying one?Obviously it is
because he is not speaking in absolute terms, but only within a certain context
– in this case, the shared reliance on the Qur'an and Sunnah
(which becomes clear from the balance of his remarks).

As Sutter
himself admits, “Spencer claims, over and
over, that he never, ever condemns all Muslims or all of Islam” (p. 7).
It is never explained why a man would try to get people to believe something by
constantly insisting on the exact opposite, however.

And,
although Sutter did not see fit to provide us with any of these examples, in his
introduction to Islam Unveiled Spencer
writes that he does not intend to “indict Muslims in general or Islam as a
whole.Indeed, there is a great deal
to love in Islamic culture, literature and music.Islam is not a monolith, and the culture that it
has inspired has bestowed great beauty upon the world.”

Spencer goes
on to say that, “Any reasonable person understands that a
criticism of Islam is not an attack on all those who adhere to that faith.If the seeds of terrorism are found to
lie at the heart of Islam, that does not make every Muslim a terrorist, nor does
it excuse any injustice toward Muslims.” (emphasis mine)

The problem,
of course, is that Mr. Sutter is not being reasonable.

Nor is he
being logically consistent.
Interpreting any sort of criticism of Islam as an attack on all of Islam means
having to assume that Islam is a monolith.In
the same way, pretending that all Muslims are being attacked by pointing out the
less tasteful elements of Islam (such as the policy of putting apostates to
death) means stereotyping all Muslims as having the same beliefs.

Sutter is
proof that honesty is the best policy, as being intentionally naïve often makes
a person look plain stupid.

Conclusion

One of the
drawbacks to the digital age is that it allows just about anyone to publish just
about anything, regardless of merit or truth.Problems develop when such information is
then referenced by others if it were fact, as is the case with Sutter and CAIR's
union of convenience.

Sutter’s
“exposé” of Robert Spencer is really just a compilation of every negative thing
that has ever been said about Spencer on the Internet, thrown together in one
jumbled mass.His work is
egotistical, intellectually shallow and blatantly misleading.Even his own commentary around the
quotations of others belies an immature understanding of the very issues that he
pretends to have mastered.

If not for
CAIR’s fleeting endorsement and his own success at censoring opposing viewpoints
from the Internet there would be absolutely no reason to take either Jim Sutter
or his “research” seriously.He is a
mendacious character with a comical sense of self-importance.Like a little boy banging on a pan,
Sutter’s loud noises tell us nothing more than his personal desire for the
attention of others.

This
small-time con man is a legend only in his own mind,
however.Consider this July 13th
posting from his site:

“Also in the past couple
of weeks, I have received numerous compliments on this site, and have heard from
(currently) 141 former hate mongers, followers of hate mongers, and former
members of hate speech sites, including former Jihad Watch members. All have
stated that this blog helped them become aware of the
dangers of hate speech, the fallacies used by hate mongers, and the danger this
presents to society. Several have offered to help in the battle against hatred.”

During the
four weeks prior to this, a period in which numerous fans and “141 former hate
mongers” were supposed to have contacted him, Sutter posted 24 lengthy blog entries on his site, to which there were a grand total
of
zero
comments.

Of the eight
comments received during the four weeks that followed this grand claim, three
were from the same person and only one was even remotely complimentary.Fewer than a dozen people a day were
bothering to visit his site and (according to the IP tracker on his sidebar)
most appeared to be the same small handful of critics.

Beyond the
lies, Sutter the pretender compensates for his obscurity by trying to destroy
those who have put legitimate effort into their work and are enjoying greater
success because of it.He is not a
maker; he is a taker, and a dangerous one at that because of his work to
suppress the free exchange of ideas from the public arena.

Jim Sutter
is a small man who is trying to inflate his impact on the world merely by
tearing down the accomplishments of those greater than he.As Ayn Rand
might put it, he is not a producer, but a looter of those who do produce.